I totaled their Yugo... Even though Round Table encourages their drivers to drive as fast as possible, even going so far as to keep maps of where police are likely to be...
Something tells me that those maps are unnecessary. I'm impressed you got enough speed up to total a Yugo =)
While I don't agree with the slippery slope argument, the AC has a point. All responses to him at this point have used the killing metaphor, but I don't think that's appropriate. This process is more akin to torture.
We have rules for war that disallow such things as dumdum bullets designed to maim the hell out of people. We have rules against torture (though the US doesn't seem to concern itself with following them). It's clear to me that even in situations where killing is sanctioned, such as war, we don't like the idea of prolonged anguish.
Now apply this to the bugs. To the extent that they have consciousness, by implanting these devices their control over their movements is subverted. The creature has no idea why it's suddenly flying around in circles and can do nothing to stop it. This is unquestionably causing stress on the beetle's nervous system, conscious or not.
Personally, I don't think it will get to the point where it is used on people, but I could see it being used in birds and mammals like cats and dogs, all of which we know are conscious at some level higher than insects, and all of which would be adversely affected by a loss of control.
It can be claimed that such implants will pave the way for human control of external devices, and the benefits of that outweigh ethical concerns, but it should at least be discussed IMO.
"Micello is quite literally Google maps for the insides of buildings," said Ankit Agarwal, founder and CEO of Micello. "We are mapping the last unchartered territory--the last mile--between the front door and where you are going."
You made known your opposition to catastrophic insurance, and it is reasonable. Your response to my suggestion makes sense as well. In fact I've thought about looking into health savings accounts because insurance is such a racket, but I don't know enough about them yet to see their trade-offs.
You have still failed to address the issue of letting companies offer plans across state lines and instead chose to try and attack d3ac0n as a shill. Just because the post you responded to is clearly from an anti-regulation perspective doesn't mean you can write off everything inside it as bunk.
Whoa, hang on there, cowboy. The point you've responded to states that two kinds of regulation (preventing companies from offering catastrophic coverage, and preventing companies from offering policies across state lines) are bad. Your response is that there's this entirely different problem, and that a generally unregulated health insurance industry causes it, so we had better leave these regulations in place.
Your straw man is showing.
A) If these regulations are in place, it's obviously not a wholly unregulated market. There are hundreds of thousands of regulations that the health industry has to comply with, so it is in no way generally unregulated, either. B) The point you responded to was talking about two specific regulations that are harming the market. C) These problems exist currently, the two classes of regulation in the quoted point have nothing to do with recision, and I can see no reason why it would cause recision to increase if those two classes of regulation were removed. If you can find one, state it and it'll be worth discussing. D) If you think that more regulation is needed to combat recision, then say as much, but keep in mind that regulation is targeted. You can't just point to something and say, "well, this is only 62% regulated, and this is 87% which is obviously better." There is such a thing as bad regulation.
Recision is a problem, and I personally think it's only fair that if you've paid premiums into the system and then require health care, the insurance company must be liable to pay some sizeable percentage of what you paid--a starting point for discussion would be (TOTAL_PREMIUMS_PAID - TOTAL_INSURANCE_PAYOUTS_TO_DATE)--before dropping your policy. I'm sure it gets messier the more you dig into it, and I'm no fan of regulations myself, but I would be pretty comfortable with something like that.
That's a good point: just because it's not in the Constitution or Bill of Rights doesn't mean that it isn't a right. However, health care still cannot morally be a right because for now and the foreseeable future, health care requires human labor, and claiming health care as a right is in effect claiming that I have a claim to a doctor's labor--because if it's a right, I certainly don't need to pay for it.
I did not fail, the generations who came before me failed in their civic duty to keep a watchful eye on their government, giving us the bloated, corrupt monstrosity of a system that exists today. I do what I can--I frequently call my congressmen to voice my opinion, I donate to organizations such as DownsizeDC and the Campaign for Liberty, I discuss politics with friends and family--yet the deck is stacked so highly against me that I'm a Libertarian nutjob just because I don't want to try to control other people's lives.
It's not so bad yet that it can't be turned around, but it looks like most people have given up on detaching from the government's engorged tit and taking steps toward the freedom once enjoyed by this nation's citizens.
Pragmatism does not ignore ideals. The idealist sees the goal, but with such clarity and focus that anything short of that goal is ignored and belittled. The pragmatist sees the goal clearly as well, but is more able to recognize progress taking place to reach that goal, thus has a greater ability to take stock of the current situation and use it to approach the goal in practice.
Which is not to say that their is no role for idealists, since I believe that there is, but that pragmatism should not be a dirty word.
Using the AC's logic, those officers shouldn't be allowed to play Wii Sports even when they're off duty, because even when they're off duty, they're on duty. o_O
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive. Putting features in front of the user rather than 3 to 4 deep in a menu system is far more intuitive.
The ribbon is littered with dropdown menus. They may not be intuitive in your opinion, but it appears that they're still necessary.
No, they are not always considered on duty, otherwise they would always be in uniform.
They are not "still exercising their powers;" it's just that they retain the ability to exercise them in the case where they see something illegal in the same way that an EMT retains his ability to help out in medical emergencies. If I'm not mistaken, they (police) don't have the same legal protections when doing police work while off-duty, nor are they acting as a representative of the police while doing off-duty things like going to the bar, making love to their wives or, yes, playing Wii Sports. I know several officers, and one of them has told me that he's discouraged from doing police work while not on the clock unless it's something serious like spotting an assault or burglary in progress. YMMV.
You raise a good point--that ecosystems are not static--but you're overlooking the amount of drastic change that can be introduced by humans. "Stable" is not "static" and need not be followed by "equilibrium." There are such things as "stable growth" and "stable markets," both of which imply some level of change.
New species do colonize ecosystems without human intervention, but their introduction is generally gradual, through slow geographical expansion which results in their introduction to ecosystems related to the original. What we have here is much more akin to the sudden, violent change you mentioned, and that kind of change is the biggest threat to our species.
If you value ecosystems' stability, you should be fighting the weed tooth and nail because to allow it to expand will quite possibly result in a violent change to the ecosystem that is bad for us. Saying, "Well it's already here, best to stop fighting it so it'll stabilize into a new ecosystem" is akin to saying, "Well, yes, we know we're causing climate change, but we should just go full steam ahead so the planet gets used to its new atmosphere."
Yeah, I read that, but not very carefully. I'm more focused on the policies at hand, and I wasn't responding to defend the guy. My entry point into the thread was reading the highly-rated AC comment I linked which actually did a good job of rationally outlining the issue of fascist and socialist policy. My reading of the rest of the thread was colored by that initial post, so I missed the import of that last statement.
And yet, everything else in my post--which in my mind is far more important--goes unacknowledged, all because I failed to properly chastise some random Internet person for calling Obama Hitler.
Hitler's idea of a state was a genocidal, deeply racist, right-wing extremist, fascist junta presiding over a society run purely on hierarchical peer pressure, a state further corrupted and held in power by an overreaching military-industrial complex. It was the poster child of a surveilance state that really deserved the label "totalitarian".
Did you read the whole thread? Sitarlo is not saying that Obama is the second coming of Hitler, he's pointing out political similarities. See "I don't think Obama is a evil person like Hitler obviously was, but they share startling political traits." Now, it's hard to reconcile that with his opening post declaring that Obama's administration is "bent on destroying the U.S." but the inflammatory statement doesn't nullify the valid comparison, which was further illuminated by this AC.
If you absolutely must compare today's political ideologies with that you'd find that our contemporary right-wing parties are actually much closer to this than the left -
Oh, I don't know about that. Obama is still fighting Bush's wars, still keeping Bush's secrets, still using secret prisons, still doling out money to businesses with strings attached, and also trying to push a socialist health care agenda. If anything, he takes Bush's fascist policies and mixes in some socialism.
- but even Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson are not quite in the same leage as Hitler, and that's saying something.
And this is the root of the problem. There's an automatic connection between "fascism" and "Nazis" and all the baggage they bring. It's nearly impossible to talk about policies without getting tangled up in connotations. This is due both to Republicans using the word for scare tactics rather than honest discussion and to constant conditioning in all of us to equate the two--I think this is unintentional, but those inclined towards tinfoil-hattery may claim otherwise. Whatever the cause, without stepping back and looking at exactly what "fascism" and "socialism" mean, as done by the AC above, the issues cannot be discussed. Whether or not Obama's policies fall under either category is certainly open to debate, but talk of genocide only clouds the issue. It's like saying that the US is a democracy and had slavery and a civil war, so discussing whether or not a nation has democratic aspects must always mean talk of slavery and civil war.
I can't help but wonder: why didn't you people cry out when our civil liberties were taken away progressively in the time after 9/11? Now that was a lost opportunity, that was the last time when freedom was actually at stake. Not only did we lose that fight so thoroughly during the Bush administration, Obama is now actually legitimizing those changes. That would have been a fight worth our time. That would have been the moment to stand up for liberty. What did you do to prevent that? I sincerely hope you didn't just sit on your ass like I did.
I protested. I called my congressmen. I ranted to family and friends, and even had some success convincing former True Believers that the PATRIOT act was bad for us. I didn't vote at all in 2000 because at the time I didn't think politics mattered. 9/11, or rather the reaction to it, was my wake-up call that my desire to simply be allowed to live my life how I wish is not a concern to those in power. I voted 3rd party in '04 and Ron Paul in '08 because I reject both faces of the two-party system. The opportunity to keep some of our waning civil liberties may have been missed, but I did my damnedest and will continue to fight for (re)gaining freedom until it's no longer necessary.
"When the researchers swabbed and tested 50 shower heads from nine cities in seven different states in the US, including New York City and Denver, they found 30% of the devices posed a potential risk."
This study was done in the US, and though the sample size is small, 30% is certainly not "very low."
By "real" I mean things that obey the laws of non-contradiction and causality, which wavefunctions don't (which is why we see experimental violations of Bell's Inequalities.)
I'm confused. It looks like you're saying that there is experimental verification of wavefunctions, and that wavefunctions are (or can be) acausal and self-contradicting. If this is so, wouldn't that mean that those laws are (at the very least) incomplete and thus not an accurate test for reality? Isn't stuff at the quantum level like reality's machine code? Could it be that the laws you mention are like programming language limitations, able to be circumvented when you're working at a low enough level? Or maybe even just conventions?
These are genuine questions. I'm a layman with mystical leanings, so I get excited when I see things like non-locality and acausality. I'm surprised that others aren't, because stuff like that seems to say "reality has a more complex structure than we thought" and opens new avenues for investigation. It's a shame to say "well that's just not real" and ignore it, especially for those with a scientific mindset (with or without the mysticism). Or I could be missing something obvious to you wizards who work and play in the quantum realm. More information is always appreciated...
Agreed. Google also needs to buckle down and make their own damn hardware. The OS is nice, the alliance is nice, but the fact that different phones all support different features of the OS leads to market confusion. If Google made a smartphone, their brand alone (sitting at the forefront, not a footnote to Motorola) would get a lot of people interested. My experience leads me to believe that they'd do a good job with the hardware interface, even if it just ended up being an iClone.
Slashdot Mirror
Is that people just being petty or is it that meeting the first 80% of a goal is much easier than the last 20%?
I been resisting offers to do technical writing since I write fiction in my off times.
Have you considered marketing? ;)
My nipples explode with delight!
I totaled their Yugo ...
Even though Round Table encourages their drivers to drive as fast as possible, even going so far as to keep maps of where police are likely to be...
Something tells me that those maps are unnecessary. I'm impressed you got enough speed up to total a Yugo =)
While I don't agree with the slippery slope argument, the AC has a point. All responses to him at this point have used the killing metaphor, but I don't think that's appropriate. This process is more akin to torture.
We have rules for war that disallow such things as dumdum bullets designed to maim the hell out of people. We have rules against torture (though the US doesn't seem to concern itself with following them). It's clear to me that even in situations where killing is sanctioned, such as war, we don't like the idea of prolonged anguish.
Now apply this to the bugs. To the extent that they have consciousness, by implanting these devices their control over their movements is subverted. The creature has no idea why it's suddenly flying around in circles and can do nothing to stop it. This is unquestionably causing stress on the beetle's nervous system, conscious or not.
Personally, I don't think it will get to the point where it is used on people, but I could see it being used in birds and mammals like cats and dogs, all of which we know are conscious at some level higher than insects, and all of which would be adversely affected by a loss of control.
It can be claimed that such implants will pave the way for human control of external devices, and the benefits of that outweigh ethical concerns, but it should at least be discussed IMO.
The gist of the video was "there is lots of data. we are working to make a holographic disc." Completely information-free!
"Micello is quite literally Google maps for the insides of buildings," said Ankit Agarwal, founder and CEO of Micello. "We are mapping the last unchartered territory--the last mile--between the front door and where you are going."
Whoa. Big building.
At least it would make Kurzweil happy...
You made known your opposition to catastrophic insurance, and it is reasonable. Your response to my suggestion makes sense as well. In fact I've thought about looking into health savings accounts because insurance is such a racket, but I don't know enough about them yet to see their trade-offs.
You have still failed to address the issue of letting companies offer plans across state lines and instead chose to try and attack d3ac0n as a shill. Just because the post you responded to is clearly from an anti-regulation perspective doesn't mean you can write off everything inside it as bunk.
Whoa, hang on there, cowboy. The point you've responded to states that two kinds of regulation (preventing companies from offering catastrophic coverage, and preventing companies from offering policies across state lines) are bad. Your response is that there's this entirely different problem, and that a generally unregulated health insurance industry causes it, so we had better leave these regulations in place.
Your straw man is showing.
A) If these regulations are in place, it's obviously not a wholly unregulated market. There are hundreds of thousands of regulations that the health industry has to comply with, so it is in no way generally unregulated, either.
B) The point you responded to was talking about two specific regulations that are harming the market.
C) These problems exist currently, the two classes of regulation in the quoted point have nothing to do with recision, and I can see no reason why it would cause recision to increase if those two classes of regulation were removed. If you can find one, state it and it'll be worth discussing.
D) If you think that more regulation is needed to combat recision, then say as much, but keep in mind that regulation is targeted. You can't just point to something and say, "well, this is only 62% regulated, and this is 87% which is obviously better." There is such a thing as bad regulation.
Recision is a problem, and I personally think it's only fair that if you've paid premiums into the system and then require health care, the insurance company must be liable to pay some sizeable percentage of what you paid--a starting point for discussion would be (TOTAL_PREMIUMS_PAID - TOTAL_INSURANCE_PAYOUTS_TO_DATE)--before dropping your policy. I'm sure it gets messier the more you dig into it, and I'm no fan of regulations myself, but I would be pretty comfortable with something like that.
That's a good point: just because it's not in the Constitution or Bill of Rights doesn't mean that it isn't a right. However, health care still cannot morally be a right because for now and the foreseeable future, health care requires human labor, and claiming health care as a right is in effect claiming that I have a claim to a doctor's labor--because if it's a right, I certainly don't need to pay for it.
In addition to sugar tariffs and quotas, we also have corn subsidies totaling $56 billion over 10 years. The rest of your post is of course accurate.
I did not fail, the generations who came before me failed in their civic duty to keep a watchful eye on their government, giving us the bloated, corrupt monstrosity of a system that exists today. I do what I can--I frequently call my congressmen to voice my opinion, I donate to organizations such as DownsizeDC and the Campaign for Liberty, I discuss politics with friends and family--yet the deck is stacked so highly against me that I'm a Libertarian nutjob just because I don't want to try to control other people's lives.
It's not so bad yet that it can't be turned around, but it looks like most people have given up on detaching from the government's engorged tit and taking steps toward the freedom once enjoyed by this nation's citizens.
Pragmatism does not ignore ideals. The idealist sees the goal, but with such clarity and focus that anything short of that goal is ignored and belittled. The pragmatist sees the goal clearly as well, but is more able to recognize progress taking place to reach that goal, thus has a greater ability to take stock of the current situation and use it to approach the goal in practice.
Which is not to say that their is no role for idealists, since I believe that there is, but that pragmatism should not be a dirty word.
Yes, and I'm still bemused by the whole thing.
Using the AC's logic, those officers shouldn't be allowed to play Wii Sports even when they're off duty, because even when they're off duty, they're on duty. o_O
Actually the ribbon style is not built for eye candy but rather for usability. The problem with menu style systems is that it is not intuitive.
Putting features in front of the user rather than 3 to 4 deep in a menu system is far more intuitive.
The ribbon is littered with dropdown menus. They may not be intuitive in your opinion, but it appears that they're still necessary.
Ah. Now I understand - you think it's unethical to enforce the law, and thus those who enforce the law must be bullies.
Is it ethical to enforce an unethical law?
No, they are not always considered on duty, otherwise they would always be in uniform.
They are not "still exercising their powers;" it's just that they retain the ability to exercise them in the case where they see something illegal in the same way that an EMT retains his ability to help out in medical emergencies. If I'm not mistaken, they (police) don't have the same legal protections when doing police work while off-duty, nor are they acting as a representative of the police while doing off-duty things like going to the bar, making love to their wives or, yes, playing Wii Sports. I know several officers, and one of them has told me that he's discouraged from doing police work while not on the clock unless it's something serious like spotting an assault or burglary in progress. YMMV.
You raise a good point--that ecosystems are not static--but you're overlooking the amount of drastic change that can be introduced by humans. "Stable" is not "static" and need not be followed by "equilibrium." There are such things as "stable growth" and "stable markets," both of which imply some level of change.
New species do colonize ecosystems without human intervention, but their introduction is generally gradual, through slow geographical expansion which results in their introduction to ecosystems related to the original. What we have here is much more akin to the sudden, violent change you mentioned, and that kind of change is the biggest threat to our species.
If you value ecosystems' stability, you should be fighting the weed tooth and nail because to allow it to expand will quite possibly result in a violent change to the ecosystem that is bad for us. Saying, "Well it's already here, best to stop fighting it so it'll stabilize into a new ecosystem" is akin to saying, "Well, yes, we know we're causing climate change, but we should just go full steam ahead so the planet gets used to its new atmosphere."
Yeah, I read that, but not very carefully. I'm more focused on the policies at hand, and I wasn't responding to defend the guy. My entry point into the thread was reading the highly-rated AC comment I linked which actually did a good job of rationally outlining the issue of fascist and socialist policy. My reading of the rest of the thread was colored by that initial post, so I missed the import of that last statement.
And yet, everything else in my post--which in my mind is far more important--goes unacknowledged, all because I failed to properly chastise some random Internet person for calling Obama Hitler.
Hitler's idea of a state was a genocidal, deeply racist, right-wing extremist, fascist junta presiding over a society run purely on hierarchical peer pressure, a state further corrupted and held in power by an overreaching military-industrial complex. It was the poster child of a surveilance state that really deserved the label "totalitarian".
Did you read the whole thread? Sitarlo is not saying that Obama is the second coming of Hitler, he's pointing out political similarities. See "I don't think Obama is a evil person like Hitler obviously was, but they share startling political traits." Now, it's hard to reconcile that with his opening post declaring that Obama's administration is "bent on destroying the U.S." but the inflammatory statement doesn't nullify the valid comparison, which was further illuminated by this AC.
If you absolutely must compare today's political ideologies with that you'd find that our contemporary right-wing parties are actually much closer to this than the left -
Oh, I don't know about that. Obama is still fighting Bush's wars, still keeping Bush's secrets, still using secret prisons, still doling out money to businesses with strings attached, and also trying to push a socialist health care agenda. If anything, he takes Bush's fascist policies and mixes in some socialism.
- but even Dick Cheney and Pat Robertson are not quite in the same leage as Hitler, and that's saying something.
And this is the root of the problem. There's an automatic connection between "fascism" and "Nazis" and all the baggage they bring. It's nearly impossible to talk about policies without getting tangled up in connotations. This is due both to Republicans using the word for scare tactics rather than honest discussion and to constant conditioning in all of us to equate the two--I think this is unintentional, but those inclined towards tinfoil-hattery may claim otherwise. Whatever the cause, without stepping back and looking at exactly what "fascism" and "socialism" mean, as done by the AC above, the issues cannot be discussed. Whether or not Obama's policies fall under either category is certainly open to debate, but talk of genocide only clouds the issue. It's like saying that the US is a democracy and had slavery and a civil war, so discussing whether or not a nation has democratic aspects must always mean talk of slavery and civil war.
I can't help but wonder: why didn't you people cry out when our civil liberties were taken away progressively in the time after 9/11? Now that was a lost opportunity, that was the last time when freedom was actually at stake. Not only did we lose that fight so thoroughly during the Bush administration, Obama is now actually legitimizing those changes. That would have been a fight worth our time. That would have been the moment to stand up for liberty. What did you do to prevent that? I sincerely hope you didn't just sit on your ass like I did.
I protested. I called my congressmen. I ranted to family and friends, and even had some success convincing former True Believers that the PATRIOT act was bad for us. I didn't vote at all in 2000 because at the time I didn't think politics mattered. 9/11, or rather the reaction to it, was my wake-up call that my desire to simply be allowed to live my life how I wish is not a concern to those in power. I voted 3rd party in '04 and Ron Paul in '08 because I reject both faces of the two-party system. The opportunity to keep some of our waning civil liberties may have been missed, but I did my damnedest and will continue to fight for (re)gaining freedom until it's no longer necessary.
"When the researchers swabbed and tested 50 shower heads from nine cities in seven different states in the US, including New York City and Denver, they found 30% of the devices posed a potential risk."
This study was done in the US, and though the sample size is small, 30% is certainly not "very low."
By "real" I mean things that obey the laws of non-contradiction and causality, which wavefunctions don't (which is why we see experimental violations of Bell's Inequalities.)
I'm confused. It looks like you're saying that there is experimental verification of wavefunctions, and that wavefunctions are (or can be) acausal and self-contradicting. If this is so, wouldn't that mean that those laws are (at the very least) incomplete and thus not an accurate test for reality? Isn't stuff at the quantum level like reality's machine code? Could it be that the laws you mention are like programming language limitations, able to be circumvented when you're working at a low enough level? Or maybe even just conventions?
These are genuine questions. I'm a layman with mystical leanings, so I get excited when I see things like non-locality and acausality. I'm surprised that others aren't, because stuff like that seems to say "reality has a more complex structure than we thought" and opens new avenues for investigation. It's a shame to say "well that's just not real" and ignore it, especially for those with a scientific mindset (with or without the mysticism). Or I could be missing something obvious to you wizards who work and play in the quantum realm. More information is always appreciated...
Agreed. Google also needs to buckle down and make their own damn hardware. The OS is nice, the alliance is nice, but the fact that different phones all support different features of the OS leads to market confusion. If Google made a smartphone, their brand alone (sitting at the forefront, not a footnote to Motorola) would get a lot of people interested. My experience leads me to believe that they'd do a good job with the hardware interface, even if it just ended up being an iClone.
"Scientists Prove Through Quantum Mechanics That Ignorance Is Bliss" ?